No American should be denied a taxpayer-funded job because of what he or she believes about religion. Yet that’s exactly … Continued

by Barry W. Lynn

No American should be denied a taxpayer-funded job because of what he or she believes about religion. Yet that’s exactly what is happening today under the “faith-based” initiative. It’s wrong, and it time for it to stop.

The idea of awarding tax aid to religious groups to run various secular programs for people in need is not new. As a strict advocate of separation of church and state, I’m not a huge fan of the idea, but courts have permitted such public aid under certain conditions.

What is new is the insistence that religious groups can take tax aid and still engage in overt discrimination on religious grounds when hiring staff. This concept was aggressively promoted by the administration of President George W. Bush. It was a bad idea then, and it hasn’t improved with age.

I think Obama recognized that it poses unacceptable civil rights and civil liberties problems to give massive federal subsidies to religious organizations to run social service programs and then let them turn away qualified job applicants because the applicants hold the “wrong” views about religion.

Slowly and laboriously, President Obama did make some changes. The White House issued an executive order that presented some enhanced transparency in grant making. It also included a guarantee that people could receive a secular alternative if they didn’t want their social services delivered in places of worship festooned with scriptures and icons they didn’t accept. (It remains to be seen how this plays out on the ground.)

However, as noted by Joshua DuBois, executive director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, at a recent Brookings Institution gathering, the pesky hiring issue was officially “entirely unresolved.”

I’d call this a “close but no cigar” assessment of what is actually going on. I have no doubt that the administration didn’t want to resolve the hiring issue in the midst of a campaign where every opponent of the president had declared him the lead general in some completely nonexistent “war on religion.”

For several years, though, Obama administration officials have said that any discriminatory hiring in federally funded programs would be assessed on a “case-by-case” basis – although they didn’t disclose what standards were to be used to make or break the “case.” Standard-less reviews are usually referred to as “doing whatever you want,” not a well-known constitutional or administrative law standard.

At the Brookings event, DuBois acknowledged that “the policy is as it was before.” This has meant that a religious grant-seeker could simply assert – you might say “self-certify” – that it believed its religious practice would be “burdened” by not being allowed to take government funds and discriminate with them.

The Justice Department has acknowledged it affirmatively permitted nine grantees to use religion to discriminate in 2009 alone. There is no information on how many more of these waivers have been granted by other agencies or whether anyone’s “self-certified” assessment had been rejected.

Many people have heard that it is a burden to have to hire openly and without regard to some particular attribute. It’s an old argument. Airlines used to say they didn’t want to hire men as flight attendants because the then-overwhelmingly male business travelers felt more “comfortable” with service from pretty young women in skirts.

Comfort level in these instances has long been rejected as a legally permissible standard. Yet some religious voices of today make spiritual camaraderie a basis for using taxpayer dollars from all to hire only from a pool of those just like them. Under the faith-based initiative, this is elevated to some kind of constitutional rights claim instead of being relegated to the dustbin of invidious discrimination.

Our country first committed itself to the principle that no one should be disqualified from government-funded jobs because of his or her religion in 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order ending such discrimination.

Subsequent presidents – Republican and Democrat alike – recommitted themselves to this principle over the next several decades. As President John F. Kennedy explained, “[I]t is the plain and positive obligation of the United States government to promote and ensure equal opportunity for all qualified persons, without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin, employed or seeking employment…on government contracts….”

After this longstanding national commitment to nondiscrimination was repudiated by the Bush administration, I was heartened in 2008, as a presidential candidate, Obama promised to return to our old principles.

“If you get a federal grant,” he said during a speech in Ohio, “you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them – or against the people you hire – on the basis of their religion.”

Fulfilling that commitment should not be so hard. It would be a simple acknowledgment that Bush had been wrong in his failure to adhere to a decades-old commitment to a civil rights framework that didn’t allow religious discrimination either.

Much was made at Brookings of the work the current White House faith-based office does to encourage interfaith dialogue and programs in the United States and around the world. There was even a hint that this might help national security – and, yes, it might.

But it could also backfire. Is U.S. prestige overseas enhanced when we give tens of millions of dollars to groups like World Vision, an evangelical outfit active around the globe – even in predominately Hindu or Muslim nations – that requires employees to sign a Trinitarian Christian statement of faith?

More to the point, how can any administration make a case, with a straight face, that our national values are respected when some religious employers can receive taxpayer money even as they figuratively or literally post signs reading, “Help Wanted. No Jews, Muslims or Hindus Need Apply?”

Organizations – religious or otherwise – that take government money must abide by certain rules. That some religious groups don’t want to follow the rules does not mean their religious freedom rights have been violated; they aren’t entitled to these funds, nor are they required to take them. The organization can continue to do their work and discriminate with their own money.

The government should not fund efforts to use religion to discriminate. We must protect the religious freedom of our government employees and stand for the principle of nondiscrimination.

Doesn’t WaPo let ACLJ, people who believe just that, post their intolerance around here all the time?

amelia45

I think we need to end the entire faith based initiatives program needs to be done away with. It isn’t just in the hiring of people, but in the insistence, at least on the part of Catholic groups, that the program be tailored to their faith beliefs. It places the government in the position of promoting a particular religious belief – and can’t do anything but lead to “favoring” some religious beliefs over others.

mbeck1

Beyond the establishment clause and the separation of church and state issue, such a relationship can quickly turn into a form of political patronage. In this case, the patronage flows to a religious entity, which then hires workers to dispense services and messages.

When a person’s job is tied to a particular political party and dependent on who is running the government, they cannot act without being influenced by such a relationship. The fact that the money is funneled through a religious institution with its own agenda further complicates the matter. There is already a strong incentive for workers to support an employer that is funded by the government. By allowing a religious institution to hire only fellow believers, the church, synagogue, or mosque, as the provider of their livelihood, can then more easily control where those services are directed and to whom they are provided, as well as any religious message they want to communicate. Such a relationship is already fraught with potential conflicts of interest. Adding religion to the mix is potentially corrupting of both the religious entity and its congregants, and the government it is then dependent on.

Keystone Warrior

Unless you are actually a priest or some other divine servant of imaginary friends in the sky, no employer – be it a church or a private business – should be permitted to discriminate against you for not being of their faith. Why you would want to work for them anyway amazes me, but some people do not know who they are really working for when they apply for and then take a job. I think the faith-based initiatives idea should be scrapped, but I am not some sniveling, spineless politician scurrying about trying to keep enough people happy that I get my job back every few years.

Dump all the faith-based initiatives. Stop propping up bigoted domains such as the Boy Scouts by gibing them access to public land at rental rates nobody else could swing. Don’t give any economic development breaks to discriminatory private companies to move into town and hire people: Chic-Fil-A, Hobby Lobby, and WalMart…

DRJJJ

Secularization of church and state is working- Turn on the news! When we invite hell into our country, don’t be suprised when all hell breaks loose!

DRJJJ

Ya, the Red cross, Salvation army, etc etc and 10s of thousands of churches across this country serving the least of us until in hurts isn’t needed huh?

Catken1

Actually, we’re a lot less violent than the vast majority of theocracies, including Christian ones.

But that’s a fact, and I’m sorry if facts confuse you.

Catken1

So if you do some good, you’re allowed to take everyone’s money and then show favoritism in your hiring? Not the way the Constitution sees it, sorry.

(And the Salvation Army isn’t a charity. They make you pray before you can eat, to their God in their church. Essentially, they exist to bribe desperate poor people with food to worship as they would have them worship. The poor deserve religious freedom, too, but the Salvation Army doesn’t respect that.)

Jen McElhenie

I have more questions about how these ‘faith based’ initiatives get state/federal funding; while retaining the right to refuse (clients/patients) on religious grounds?
If their religion prohibits a service that the state &/or government provides for…then it should ALSO prohibit accepting the funding for it, too?
I certainly never walked into a church asking for help with my reproductive healthcare… I would appreciate if the healthcare system did NOT contract with CHURCHES for delivery of these healthcare services!!! (Y)